Electronic Book Review - filmhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/film
enTank Girl, Postfeminist Media Manifestohttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/solo
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Elyce Helford</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-01-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>For this feminist cultural studies scholar, postfeminism centers in individualism and the belief that personal choices and “bootstrap” efforts can bring a woman (and hence all women) empowerment and equality. Hence, postfeminism rejects radical feminist emphasis on “sexual politics”; it is a mindset/movement that refuses group efforts and struggles against male dominance (patriarchy). Self-declared postfeminists often tout appreciation of second-wave feminism and the privileges the movement has won for women; however, they quickly make plain that such collective work is no longer necessary. Moreover, postfeminists may go further, reacting strongly to perceived failures of second-wave feminism. For example, a postfeminist position affirms gender difference and celebrates traditional feminine traits, such as (maternal) nurturance, a woman’s “right” to choose the role of housewife/mother over career, and the importance of women’s sexuality as a central source of empowerment. Such examples make plain that postfeminism is largely a white, middle- to upper-class phenomenon. It also appeals particularly to young women, perhaps most for its optimism. From sexual harassment to rape to attaining a fulfilling sex life, a postfeminist perspective suggests that women can control their destiny through their individual efforts alone. Just quit that job, take a martial arts class, and wear sexy clothes to the dance club and life is your oyster.</p>
<p>The hopeful, positive tone of postfeminism is alluring. We all want to feel we control our destiny; we all want to wish sexism away sometimes. And, one of my favorite media examples of the illusory power of postfeminism that does a superb job of exemplifying the primary elements I have just outlined is Rachel Talalay’s film <span class="filmtitle">Tank Girl</span>. This 1995 box office flop but Grrrl Power cult fave was the first effort of Dark Horse films, based upon the comic book of the same name. Women’s empowerment in the film is linked directly to having the right attitude and the right clothes. Lori Petty, as Tank Girl, winds her way through a dystopian future with no fear of failure because she is young, determined, and hip. When she is caught and bound by thugs, for example, she escapes the threat through her sexiness and the power of a small-dick joke. She offers to give one of the thugs a blowjob; this allows her to get him close enough to throw him off guard with a sexually demeaning joke then break his neck between her thighs. We see the sexualization of power in many other scenes as well, for example, in an early scene in which Tank Girl is forced at gunpoint to strip for a soldier and uses her talents to take his mind off her dangerousness long enough to blow him up with a grenade and, later on, in a conversation in which Jet’s concern that Tank Girl will be killed by the soldiers is rebuffed with “Jet, they’re men!” The audience is not invited to consider whether this would work if Tank Girl were not young, thin, white, and “beautiful”; moreover, the fantasy scenario (also seen in other postfeminist media hits, such as television’s <span class="filmtitle">Buffy the Vampire Slayer</span> and <span class="filmtitle">Xena: Warrior Princess</span>) keeps us from attending to the fact that no one but a fantasy heroine could break a man’s neck between her knees. We see in these images the perfect illusion of individual power and control for women in a sexist world, achieved largely through the power of youthful desirability and fantasy superpowers. The film thus emerges in my reading as a postfeminist media manifesto.</p>
<p>That the film does raise such feminist issues as sexual harassment, women’s anger, and female friendship does separate it from non- or anti-feminist efforts, as seen, for example, in Dark Horse’s second comic-to-flick conversion, <span class="filmtitle">Barb Wire</span>. That <span class="filmtitle">Tank Girl</span> was a box office flop and <span class="filmtitle">Barb Wire</span> a hit may point to the fact that, at least in the mid-90’s, even postfeminism was too much feminism for mainstream viewers. However, as a playful filmic lesson for girls and young women, <span class="filmtitle">Tank Girl</span> is definitely selling postfeminism, and selling it hard. Just as it may be difficult not to be drawn to the idea that there is enough equality in our culture not to need group efforts for social change, it is difficult not to be drawn in to the postfeminist playfulness of Tank Girl as she caresses and sits (in parodic seductiveness) on the barrel of a tank, aims it at a group of male aggressors, and asks, “Feeling a little inadequate?” <span class="filmtitle">Tank Girl</span> is all about the seductiveness of postfeminism, especially its “do-me feminist” elements. Women <span class="lightEmphasis">are</span> powerful, the film proudly announces: we have only to use what we’ve got.</p>
<p>Sadly, of course, reality hits when we exit the theater or turn off the VCR. Rape and spousal abuse is still an everyday occurrence, the glass ceiling still closes in those of us who have the privilege to even see it, and the country is still controlled almost entirely by white, upper-class men, among other sexist and even misogynist realities. In the end, for me, postfeminism is a lovely vacation spot, an escapist fantasy I like to take now and then with Tank Girl, Buffy, Xena, Anita Blake (Vampire Hunter), or any number of other film, television, or genre fiction heroines. But coming down is a bitch.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/elyce-rae-helford">Elyce Rae Helford</a>, <a href="/tags/helford">Helford</a>, <a href="/tags/buffy">buffy</a>, <a href="/tags/tank-girl">tank girl</a>, <a href="/tags/femini">femini</a>, <a href="/tags/barb-wire">barb wire</a>, <a href="/tags/xena">xena</a>, <a href="/tags/anita-blake">anita blake</a>, <a href="/tags/heroine">heroine</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/cinema">cinema</a>, <a href="/tags/postfeminism">postfeminism</a>, <a href="/tags/dick-joke">dick joke</a>, <a href="/tags/rachel-talalay">Rachel Talalay</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1080 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comJon McKenzie's response (excerpt)http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/noagon
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jon McKenzie</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-01-09</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/lazzi-fair">Game Design as Narrative Architecture</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As Henry Jenkins suggests, games are indeed not narratives, not films, not plays – but they’re also not-not-narratives, not-not-films, not-not-plays. Games share traits with other forms of cultural production, although reducing them to any one of these comes at a certain cost. Jenkins rightly contends that game designers should therefore seek to expand the forms and processes from which to draw, rather than reduce them. He is also right to point out that some ludologists are themselves much too quick to reduce narrative to overly simplistic models (e.g., strictly linear structures). Most importantly, his exploration of spatially oriented narrative forms provides provocative approaches to contemporary game design. At the same time, however, Jenkins’s stated goal to offer a “middle ground” between ludologists and narratologists remains slanted toward the narratological end of things. This is indicated in his essay’s title, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” A more playful ludologist might have offered a response titled “Narrative Architecture as Game Design.” Johan Huizinga, after all, analyzed law, war, poetry, and philosophy “as” play, and across diverse cultural traditions storytelling has complex agonistic dimensions.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="/thread/firstperson/well-syuzheted" class="internal">Henry Jenkins responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/henry-jenkins">henry jenkins</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/drama">drama</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/ludology">ludology</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/game-design">game design</a>, <a href="/tags/johan-huizinga">johan huizinga</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator974 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/noagon#comments"With each project I find myself reimagining what cinema might be": An Interview with Zoe Beloffhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/numerous
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jussi Parikka</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-10-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Scottish born and New York placed artist Zoe Beloff is one of the leading names in “media archaeological art” that reimagines and creatively remixes narrative and technological elements and themes from new and old media into fresh assemblages. Beloff is internationally recognized for a range of her works, which have been exhibited at venues that include: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the 2009 Athens Biennale. Her work has also been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Beloff’s projects have been supported by several grants and fellowships, including, in 2003, the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her projects that work through cinematic and media-cultural ideas question the novelty of digital technologies and rethink histories of visual culture in non-linear ways.</p>
<p>This conversation between Zoe Beloff and media theorist Jussi Parikka took place in March 2011 and was planned to elaborate Beloff’s artistic methods, especially in relation to the theoretical discussions in media archaeology. Media archaeology is an emerging set of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that address media history in new, often unconventional ways - both looking for elements of repetition as well as variation in the past. Media archaeology wants to understand new and emerging media cultures through the past. As such, media archaeology has been elaborated by scholars such as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and Wolfgang Ernst, but likewise the work of visual culture and media writers such as Tom Gunning, Anne Friedberg, Lev Manovich, William Uricchio, Friedrich Kittler and for instance Jonathan Crary has been essential to the birth of this disciplinary – and artistic – field. In addition to theories, media archaeology is executed through concrete art works – such as Beloff’s.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Jussi Parikka:</span> Your work has extensively dealt with 19th century pre-cinematic media cultures, but in a manner that does not deal with such technologies only as past, forgotten inventions, but as something resurrected. One could characterize your work through hybridity of old and new media. Would you consider yourself as a media archaeological artist, and could you tell us a bit more about your artistic approach to old media?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Zoe Beloff:</span> Yes, I do consider myself a media archaeological artist, but I might put the word “artist” first; though, when I began my investigations in the mid-1990s, I had not heard the term media archaeology. From a theoretical perspective, I was most inspired by two books, Jonathan Crary’s <span class="booktitle">Techniques of the Observer</span> and <span class="booktitle">the Wireless Imagination</span> edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. These books, along with my interest in the birth of cinema and nineteenth century stereo photography, really inspired me to think about our relationship with media technology. It is this complex relationship between perception, mental imagery, and the apparatus that is the focus of my work.</p>
<p>Another key event for me in terms of my “media archaeological” interests was attending an evening at the American Museum of the Moving Image where collectors were demonstrating their primitive hand cranked projectors. These apparatuses are very different from modern projectors. Light spills out everywhere. They are jerky. The earliest ones don’t even have a mechanism for a take-up reel. I started to think about how an audience a hundred years ago experienced movies very differently than we do today. Even when we watch an early film, it is a very different experience to that of an audience member who experienced them first hand. For example projectionists in the early 1900s really performed the movies. They would vary speed of the films according to what they saw on the screen or they might project the same short film over and over as a loop till people got bored and they moved on to another one.</p>
<p>Through such examples and events, I began to realize that the apparatus is always a part of the storytelling process - part of the experience of understanding media - whether people are aware of it or not. I had the idea that, to conjure up the past, it was not enough just to work with historical imagery or archival footage; one must think also about projection apparatuses of an earlier era. Soon afterwards I created a short projection performance called <span class="filmtitle">Lost</span> (1995). I worked with a stereoscopic slide projector, a toy hand cranked 16mm projector, and a hand cranked phonograph. I took 3D slides of very old and dusty stores in my neighborhood (since then they have all gone out of business) and projected fragments of 16mm film into them in such a way that ghostly figures from the past seemed to inhabit the shop windows. The film fragments came from Edison films, an Émile Cohl animation, and a primitive stag film. The whole performance with the 78rpm records skipping and the film moving forward and back, jumping in the gate was incredibly precarious. I imagined that somehow these dusty old shop windows might contain or reflect back the memories of those who had passed by over many decades. I thought that, by using this junk shop assortment of old apparatuses, I could suggest this fragile and virtual space of memory. I wanted to foreground the nineteenth century idea that machines of mechanical reproduction are really “time machines”: cinema - a time machine of movement - frame by frame awakening forgotten fantasies, stereo photography bringing about the artificial reconstruction of space, and the phonograph resurrecting the voices of the dead.</p>
<p>I was using a variety of media technologies from different eras, 1920s through the 1950s, that people had in their homes. In a way one could think of these apparatuses from different time periods as analogous to the imagery I was conjuring up - contained layers of time superimposed over each, memories from different eras.</p>
<p>But despite my interest in the apparatus and the technological as a component of media culture, it’s important to note that I’m - as I said - I’m an artist first and not a historian. So when thinking about what technology I want to use, I always start with the story and think about what might be the most expressive way to convey my ideas rather than trying to be literally accurate in a strictly historical sense. With each project, I find myself reimagining what cinema might be. For example, I discovered the book <span class="booktitle">Shadow Land: or, Light from the Other Side</span> - the autobiography of English spiritualist medium Elizabeth d’Esperance - at the same time I stumbled upon a 16mm 3D Bolex motion picture camera on Ebay. Even though the 3D Bolex was invented in the early 1950s, it seemed to me to be the perfect apparatus to make a film of her autobiography. I was particularly struck by the fact that she wrote the book in 1897 at the moment cinema was born. I started to think of the full body apparitions that she apparently conjured up during her séances as proto-cinematic figures. But there was one key difference: these phantom figures appeared to cross over into the space of the sitters and move among them. I wanted to find a visual equivalent to this breaking of the boundary between spectator and image. By projecting black and white 3D film I was able to give the impression of phantom figures crossing over into the space of the audience. Of course the nineteenth century was a very stereoscopic century; photographs were most commonly viewed in stereoscopic viewers, so a 3D camera seemed appropriate - even this camera, which was invented almost sixty years later.</p>
<p>When I made <span class="filmtitle">Shadow Land</span> (2000) and <span class="filmtitle">Charming Augustine</span> (2005), I wanted to find a way to de-familiarize cinema, to make the present day audience feel like they were seeing film for the first time. Because of the technology of the stereo Bolex projection lens, I have to use a silver screen, and the projector has to be in the space of the audience rather than in the projection booth. The image itself has a vertical aspect ratio, so viewers see a spectral black and white 3D image that is very different from the moving images we are used to. In a sense they do become like the scientists of the nineteenth century crowded around their experimental projection apparatus. Like the participants of a séance they know what they are seeing is an illusion, yet they perceive three-dimensional phantom figures anyway, such is the suspension of disbelief.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/charming_augustine_large2.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="498" /></p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> In a way, you are then tactically short-circuiting components across different media-cultural epochs. In addition, your method has extended towards digital technologies and combined them with themes that address the 19th century. Does that work - routing of media cultural topics through the old - also work as a critique of the new, such as the digital?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span>Indeed, I have also worked with digital technology to conjure up the 19th century, which is, of course, absurdly anachronistic. <span class="filmtitle">Beyond</span> began as a web serial in 1995. I used a webcam to create short movies in which I travelled into the past and explored the relationships between technology and the unconscious from the 1850s to the beginning of World War II. Here I very consciously wanted to use an early technology of our era, that is the tiny black and white webcam, to make connections between our entry into the realm of the digital and the birth of mechanical media in 19th century. I felt we could learn from the incredibly imaginative outpouring of ideas, ranging from the philosophical to the crazy and poetic, that came hand in hand with these inventions. At the same time, I wanted to show that, in many ways, what was being hyped by corporations as the latest thing in the digital domain was no more than a reworking of 19th century technologies, like the panorama or the zoetrope. So I also think of it as very much a critique of progress in the way that Walter Benjamin discussed.</p>
<p>Just because a technology is new I don’t think it is better; digital cameras aren’t, per se, better than glass plate photography. It is just a different kind of apparatus that does different things. At the same time, I don’t fetishize the past or historical objects. I am interested in creating some kind of dialog with the past to help us think through our relationship with media today.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> In various art projects, you have consistently engaged not only with resurrecting past media but also been aware of the problematic gender contexts of early media cultures. The female body itself has functioned as a “medium” in various meanings of the term: mediating between the immaterial and material regimes, as an index of the new mediatic worlds, as well as media in the sense of the excluded middle - the media that is not paid attention to despite its crucial role as the material basis for communication. Would you say that you are interested in such expansions of the notion of the medium, or what function does this idea of addressing human, female bodies as media serve?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> In his novel <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>, Thomas Pynchon described a character as a “medium, an interface between worlds.” He meant the word as designating a spirit medium but also, in my opinion, in relationship to new technologies that were changing the nature of the world during the Second World War. I quoted this line in <span class="filmtitle">Beyond</span>. I thought of myself as a medium between the world of illusion that the viewer experienced and the underworld of the computer that was in process of learning how to program.</p>
<p>My father was a parapsychologist, and so I was pretty familiar with the paranormal; although, much to his disappointment, I personally had no extrasensory talents. I wish I could take “thought photographs” but I can’t. At the same time, I do think of myself as an interface, in a sense, between past and present - real and imaginary.</p>
<p><span class="filmtitle">Beyond</span> included a number of episodes of séances in which apparitions appeared. Today there are a lot of media theorists who have been doing research in this area, but, at the time, I think Tom Gunning was the only person I could find who was writing about the relationship between early media and mediumship; the medium as a kind of camera or projector dispensing “images from her orifices.” As I have said, I am interested in exploring the relationship between desire, the unconscious, and the moving image. I was interested in spirit mediums as “thought projectors,” who created an environment where people believed they saw moving images around them. Such was the power of suggestion or the suspension of disbelief, which still holds us in its sway every time we see a movie. To me, this is just as valid a form of image making as a machine that literally projects an image.</p>
<p>I think that the history of technology often only considers the physical apparatus not the desires, or the social world, that lead to its creation. <span class="filmtitle">Charming Augustine</span> addressed that very question. It is about a young woman whose performance of hysterical symptoms fascinated the medical profession of Paris in the 1870s. The doctors and the technical staff of the Salpêtrière worked very hard to document these performances through transcripts of what she said in states of delirium and through photographs of her hysterical attacks. I think that this desire to capture both image and sound led to the development not just of film, but of narrative cinema: melodrama. In this way I think of the technical development of sound cinema and the production of melodrama and as growing out of a collaboration between the women patients, the doctors, and the technologists like the photographers Paul Régnard and Albert Londe. Too often it is simply the technologists who go down in the history books not those who created the desire for the apparatus, the reason for its existence. In this sense Elizabeth d’Esperance and Augustine were also important to the invention of the moving image. It was women like them who opened up a space of desire, of possibility that the moving image apparatus could come into existence.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> What strikes me as interesting about your work (from <span class="filmtitle">The Influencing Machine of Miss Natalija A</span> to <span class="filmtitle">The Somnambulists</span> and too, of course, your recent interest in the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society) is the entwining of psychoanalytic themes with media/cinema.</p>
<p>Your way of addressing mediatic dream worlds seems to take place in this dual articulation between sciences of the mind and the popular media culture. Can we think of media, or even more specifically the cinematic, as one analytical, even archaeological, tool to investigate the mind and its aberrations?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> I think you are asking if we can think of cinema as a psychoanalytic tool to investigate the unconscious, an interesting question.</p>
<p>Of course Freud himself had no interest in film. He turned away from the visual, and the image as a tool, to investigate the mind that had been used extensively in clinics such as the Salpêtrière, which he visited in the 1890s. Instead, he started to listen. The word and the narrative were important to Freud.(As an aside I’ve always liked the story that Charcot refused to give credence to the unconscious because it was invisible, and he couldn’t bear that there was something about a patient that you couldn’t see.) However, Freud’s fascination with narrative brings him back into the world of cinema from another perspective. And psychoanalysis has been a tool to analyze narrative cinema for quite a long time now, with Slavoj Žižek being perhaps its most visible proponent today.</p>
<p>From the early 1920s, at least, artists and theorists have been interested in the connection between cinema and the dream state, with both in reference to the viewing situation of the darkened theatre and to films themselves. Surrealist cinema and avant-garde filmmakers were interested in making films that were in some sense analogous to the dream. And after all Hollywood used to be known as the “Dream Factory.”</p>
<p>I too, think of moving images as a way to conjure up hallucinatory states. In <span class="filmtitle">The Somnambulists</span> (2008), I was interested less in referencing cinema than creating a virtual theatre to convey the idea of a “theatre of the mind.” I created an installation with small virtual 3D figures moving around inside an actual miniature theatre made of wood. The psychologist Pierre Janet (on whose case histories the project is based) wrote about how his hysterical patients would go into a state of delirium where they would talk to people only they could see. They saw, before them, fantastic figures right there in the room. So virtual theatre seemed like an interesting way to embody their visions. Indeed, popular theatre with its stock of characters seemed to be the something that they unconsciously drew to embody their fears.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/somnambulists_large2.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="371" /></p>
<p>In my exhibition <span class="filmtitle">Dreamland: the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926-1972</span> I do explore the idea of cinema as a psychoanalytical tool in a most literal fashion. Viewers are informed that the Society held an annual competition in which members were invited to re-enact their dreams on film and analyze them. I presented ten of these dream films, which illuminate the hopes, fears and fantasies of working people from the neighborhood ranging from immigrant Jews and Italians to young gay men exploring their sexuality in the 1960s. I imagined that they might have been inspired to make these films not only by the excitement around amateur movie making that began in the 1920s with the introduction of 16mm film but also by the Society’s very literal reading of passages from Freud’s <span class="booktitle">The Interpretation of Dreams</span> - specifically, where Freud discusses the idea that in dreams, wish fulfillment is often hard to discern because it is disguised by various procedures including the condensation and displacement of ideas and the dramatization of thoughts and desires in the form of “mental pictures.” Thus, when we dream we do not experience a wish as an abstract, intangible concept; instead, we find ourselves protagonists in a fully formed virtual world complete with characters we may or may not recognize from our waking life, caught up in strange and often suspenseful situations.</p>
<p>However, what I was really interested was not this very literal idea of creating re-enactments of one’s dreams on film; rather, it was the idea of actual home movies as psychoanalytic objects, very much the way Freud thought of jokes or slips of the tongue - as objects that reveal much more than their makers were consciously aware of. I created <span class="filmtitle">The Dream Films</span> (2009) with home movies that I collected over many years; I just edited them and added the titles. I simply wanted to suggest that all home movies, in their immediacy and spontaneity, tell us someone about the filmmaker’s inner life, whether he or she was aware of it or not.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> A lot of the so called media archaeological art – including yours – has focused on the 19th century and early 20th century cultures and technological apparatuses, from the visual to the sonic (Edison machines for instance). But you are also interested in post-World War II themes. Could you elaborate a bit more about this interest in human motion and management, mental illness, and also labor?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> The project I’m working on right now is an installation called <span class="filmtitle">The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff</span>. It will include video, film, drawings and objects. It began with an invitation from curator Edwin Carels to make a work for the MuHKA Museum in Antwerp.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/infernal_dream_large2.jpg" alt="" width="465" height="310" /></p>
<p>A collection of artifacts from the history of cinema called the Vrieling collection was donated to the museum a few years ago and Edwin has asked three artists to create work that incorporates and creates a dialog with aspects of the collection. I think perhaps he imagined I would work with magic lanterns and early cinema object, but instead I decided to confront what I think many would consider the least glamorous objects, the cameras and projectors that were used to create instructional films in the mid 20th century.</p>
<p>Central to my project are two film from 1950’s, <span class="filmtitle">Motion Studies Application</span> and <span class="filmtitle">Folie à Deux</span> both of which were part of a collection of 16mm films that were thrown out by Baurch College, a business College here in New York. I took 60 films, all the ones concerning workplace management and psychological disorders, and spent many happy hours screening all of them.</p>
<p>Though I don’t usually begin this way, I started work on the project in a more theoretical fashion by doing a lecture/screening with these films in conjunction with Milgram’s famous <span class="filmtitle">Obedience</span> (1962). I talked about cinema and psychosocial control, but - rather, once again - I was thinking back to cinema’s origins in motion studies in the 1880s and 1890s. Marey was paid by the French government to figure out the most efficient method for soldiers to march, while his protégé, Albert Londe, analyzed the gait of hysterical patients. From the beginning, the productive body promoted by Taylorism was always shadowed by its double, the body riven by psychic breakdown. By mid-century, this was manifest in the instructional films that I found: <span class="filmtitle">Motion Studies Application</span>, which was about how to work more efficiently on the assembly line, and <span class="filmtitle">Folie à Deux</span>, which instructed the viewer how to recognize a particular mental disorder. Here the unproductive patients, confined to the asylum, understand with paranoid lucidity that the institution is everywhere, monitoring them always. I was interested in Milgram’s film as a conscious critique of these earlier industrial films, co-opting their form only to subvert them and reveal their ideological underpinnings.</p>
<p>I’m working on the installation now. It has taken a more poetic turn, and I hope will go deeper into the subject than I was able to do in a short lecture. I am not working with the <span class="filmtitle">Obedience</span> in part because I don’t feel I have anything to add to it. Instead I created my own industrial film that I am putting into dialog with aspects of <span class="filmtitle">Motion Studies Application</span> and <span class="filmtitle">Folie à Deux</span> in a three-channel work. Now I am working on a series of drawings that are formally inspired by workplace posters. Again, as in all my projects, I am interested in our mental relation with the technologies of the moving image. Here I am drawing on the work of the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the pioneering “industrial engineers,” who believed that the worker could use the tools of cinema to change his work methods and so become more productive. Interestingly, at the same time the writing of Walter Benjamin, in a completely different way, argued that our relation with the technology of the moving image could change us and our perspective on the world. I think of them both as utopians. And I want to comment on these utopias by exploring the relationship between the body, the mind, and objects in movement.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> In this work-in-progress you mentioned finding and rescuing dozens of films from the business school collections. In general, the use of archives in artistic – and media archaeological – methods is an interesting theme. Could you elaborate on that a bit?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> Using archives is a natural part of my practice. Occasionally, I use archives as any historian would, to look for specific historical images. For example, when working on <span class="filmtitle">The Somnambulists</span>, I wanted to find films shot by doctors of their hysterical patients. However, in many ways I much prefer stumbling on films and being surprised by them. For ten years, from around 1992 to 2002, I went to the flea market every Sunday and bought every home movie that I could find. I had no idea what would be on the rolls of film. Eventually, many of them found their way into my projects, most particularly the Coney Island dream films.</p>
<p>Similarly, I just heard by chance that Baruch College was throwing out their 16mm films and I could get whatever I wanted as long as I showed up before noon with a cardboard box. These found films often push me in new directions, make me think in new ways.</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">JP:</span> So its not just about using traditional archives and collections but “found footage” as well, to capture the element of randomness - surprise - as you mention?</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">ZB:</span> I have strong feelings on the subject of found footage, but I’ll try and be brief.</p>
<p>When I work with film that I did not shoot myself, I think of myself as creating a dialog with the past. I don’t see these films as simply illustrations, the way they are used in TV documentaries. Nor do I want to just cut them up for some kind of cool montage effect. Instead, as I said, I want to create a dialog, to get under their skin, to reveal new aspects of the images that had perhaps remained hidden, to make them speak again but differently, to give them a new voice.</p>
<p>To this end, I prefer to work with films that are themselves abandoned, orphaned, or incomplete - home movies that have lost their families, and industrial films that are considered obsolete and relegated to the scrap heap. I don’t want to work with a film that was made by a director who had his or her own clear vision or voice. That is why I avoid, for example, Hollywood films. They are art too, not just “footage.” That is, in part, why I showed Milgram’s <span class="filmtitle">Obedience</span>, but I did not cut it up or incorporate it into my own project. It is his work, not mine. I have done a number of projects - for example, the performance <span class="filmtitle">Claire and Don in Slumberland</span> (2002) - where I begin the presentation with films that I did not make, but I show the works in their entirety. I just want to put them in conjunction with my own thinking, not ingest it or take credit for them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Zoe Beloff’s web page: <a href="http://www.zoebeloff.com" class="outbound">http://www.zoebeloff.com</a></p>
<p>Jussi Parikka’s web page and blog: <a href="http://jussiparikka.net" class="outbound">http://jussiparikka.net</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/found">found</a>, <a href="/tags/industrial">industrial</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/psychoanalysis">psychoanalysis</a>, <a href="/tags/dream">dream</a>, <a href="/tags/archaeology">archaeology</a>, <a href="/tags/milgram">Milgram</a>, <a href="/tags/taylorism">taylorism</a>, <a href="/tags/freud">freud</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/parapsychology">parapsychology</a>, <a href="/tags/paranormal">paranormal</a>, <a href="/tags/gender">gender</a>, <a href="/tags/medium">medium</a>, <a href="/tags/materiality">materiality</a>, <a href="/tags/cinema">cinema</a>, <a href="/tags/ghost">ghost</a>, <a href="/tags/spirit">spirit</a>, <a href="/tags/haunted">haunted</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1383 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/numerous#commentsVictoria Vesna respondshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/textattentive
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Victoria Vesna</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/formal">Between a Game and a Story?</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Computer games are clearly a distinct form of media, with an emerging history and place in entertainment and increasingly in the arts. At this particular juncture, there is much misunderstanding of this new genre primarily because games are played through established technologies such as televisions and computers. At the same time, games display characteristics that are, at least superficially, similar to existing media forms, which creates possibilities and confusion at the same time. The numerous recent attempts to develop games as extensions of profitable movies have resulted in abject failures and rare, weak successes. This, in my opinion, is due to blurry visions of how narrative is approached in these radically different mediums.</p>
<p>Perlin ascribes the inability of some games to achieve the level of engagement found in movies to their characters’ lack of realism. He asks why characters in movies seem more “real” than those in games, and how the story and the game could grow closer together. His goal is to achieve a point where the agency of the player and that of the character are so blurred that an intermediate state between “linear narrative” and “game” is achieved. Of course, the key to this is the narrative approach and the interactive design that drives the game.</p>
<p>The idea of transposing the novel narrative to films did not work until the movies emerged with a particular narrative form that is not always linear. Very few movies that follow a book religiously succeed because the medium demands different approaches to storytelling. For instance, Perlin writes about his ability to sustain the fiction of Harry Potter even after he puts the book aside. Although the movie was very successful at the box office, it received criticism precisely because it was too close to the narrative of the book. Many felt that it did not achieve the same kind of magic the book offered using old-fashioned text alone. Although related in concept, narrative is approached quite differently in literary circles from that of theater and film. Indeed, the debate of what is narrative and what is interactive is not quite resolved and shifts depending on the context. Games are developing a new context and audience who will surely define narrative in yet another way.</p>
<p>Like films and television programs, games usually have definite beginning and end points, but what happens between these points seems, at least superficially, to be dramatically different. Games are designed for extended and repeated playing, and as such necessarily resist narrative closure, and therefore have to provide pleasure for the player in other ways. They have the ability to create an illusion of narrative freedom - players can effectively dictate the course of the story depending on how they perform certain tasks. But, some would argue that there are certain games which progress without possessing a narrative at all. Racing games are the most obvious example - driving around the same track in repeated laps does not constitute a narrative as it is traditionally conceptualized. In the context of games, however, one could counter-argue that this is very much a different narrative - one that does not require writing, directing and acting as used in the movies. In games, the writing is the code, and the directing and acting is shared between the writer and the audience. These are very different worlds indeed - and the interactivity design is the key, not the degree of hyperrealism.</p>
<p>Perlin’s discussion hyper-real responsive characters, that would presumably allow for a real actor with agency to emerge, does not explain the popularity of game formats such as MUDs and MOOs. These simple text-based early game genres (<span class="lightEmphasis">Multi-User Domain</span>, and <span class="lightEmphasis">MUD, Object Oriented</span>, respectively) were successful in working with the player’s imagination, allowing for identification to happen on the basis of world-building and interaction with an online community. MUDs and MOOs are excellent examples of using words and stories that come from conventional literature in such radically different ways that an entirely new form of literature, if it can be called this, emerged.</p>
<p>Games are intrinsically different in their mode of address and almost always lose their magic when trying to assume the narrative rules of movies. Equally, movies are rarely able to give the same kind of thrill that games provide when taking on the action from games, as the <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span> movie illustrates. It will be interesting to see if yet another genre emerges - one that is a true hybrid of movies and games using the kind of software that Perlin’s research group is developing. No doubt there is much more room for diverse styles to emerge in the game world, and the hyper-realistic movie/game hybrid model that seems to be idealized by Perlin could become yet another style, standing right next to a minimalist text-based model. In any case, I believe it is the way the interactivity is designed that will make each future project a success or failure.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/simmering">Will Wright responds</a></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/botanical">Ken Perlin responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/harry-potter">harry potter</a>, <a href="/tags/realism">realism</a>, <a href="/tags/hyperreal">hyperreal</a>, <a href="/tags/hyperrealism">hyperrealism</a>, <a href="/tags/mud">MUD</a>, <a href="/tags/moo">MOO</a>, <a href="/tags/muds">MUDs</a>, <a href="/tags/moos">MOOs</a>, <a href="/tags/tomb-raider">tomb raider</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/story">story</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator938 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe Godfather Seen Through The Lens of Elite Criticism (and Vice Versa)http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/badabing
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joseph Urgo</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-01-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>A blurb by Frank Lentricchia on the back of Chris Messenger’s book calls it “a landmark in the study of popular culture.” Most readers recognize academic hype and know that even the most cautious of scholars will risk indiscretion on a book jacket. But in this case the hyperbolic claim may be understated. Messenger’s book is a phenomenon. I am at a loss to think what manifestation of <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> narratives (book, film trilogy, related movies, television programming), or what aspect of authoring, filming, marketing, or what theoretical perspective or intellectual framework Messenger overlooks in this comprehensive, intelligent, and definitive study of what is surely the twentieth century’s most telling fable of the complex intersections of work and family in American culture.</p>
<p>At the same time, Messenger’s hand shakes on the trigger: this is a nervous book. His intellectual anxiety shows as he approaches <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> with his thesis that Mario Puzo’s novel does for twentieth century America what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s <span class="booktitle">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</span> did for the nineteenth. Stowe’s novel was an international sensation, not only for its treatment of slavery but for its sentimental revelations, its view of how the world was structured in the United States and why it worked the way it worked. Domestically, her projection of that world was so convincing and so necessary to readers and audiences that the novel was staged repeatedly in cities and towns for decades after its publication. Much of Stowe’s imagination entered popular culture and remains there - Simon Legree, Uncle Tom, the transformative potential of sentimentality. <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> follows a similar trajectory. Another international blockbuster novel, <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> was followed by a hugely popular film trilogy, one of the century’s most compelling cultural achievements. What Puzo (and Francis Ford Coppola) created has entered popular discourse, to the point where the television series, <span class="tvtitle">The Sopranos</span>, can transform the fable into a morality play exploring contemporary work and family issues. “Tony’s problems become more those of a midcareer executive facing obsolescence,” in Messenger’s view, a situation that resonates in too many middle-class homes. “The Sopranos are more a danger to their immediate family and each other than they are a cancer on American society; they toil in an unhealthy and dangerous occupation that is fading” (282). The success of the HBO series is based in its firm understanding of its ideological function, where its characters themselves seem acutely aware of their predicament in an Italian American narrative of assimilation and resistance.</p>
<p>Intellectuals not usually drawn to popular entertainment may find truth in the general <span class="booktitle">Godfather</span> -as-America context, where all morality, all notions of good and evil, are staged within an essentially immoral, criminal, and violent setting. Libertarians may find truth in what Messenger calls the “male dream of anarcho-resistance to regulation and order in a civic society.” The nervousness Messenger displays (or which, perhaps, I am inferring) may stem from the audacity of the book’s governing contrast: whereas Americans in the nineteenth century recognized their most compelling narrative in a story of Christian sacrifice and redemption, in the twentieth we have come to know ourselves as gangsters, a Gunfighter Nation, in Richard Slotkin’s term, no longer cowboys but mobsters, living according to laws of our own making, self-congratulatory for a vicious morality that serves our needs as capitalist “earners.”</p>
<p>Still, Messenger’s hand on the trigger flinches. “To analyze <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> is to become something of a metaphorical Corleone family member, seeing from <span class="foreignWord">cosa nostra</span> (reconfigured as popular fiction) just what that outside world of elite fiction and criticism looks like from different discriminations and considerations within popular fiction” (33). To maintain his legitimacy, so to speak, Messenger erects an elaborate and entirely appropriate intellectual scaffolding, including (among many other approaches) Kant’s call for “the suppression of unregulated feeling in any system of judgment.” Kant leads Messenger to admit the challenge in popular fiction criticism is “nothing less than striving for a re-association of sensibility between reason and feeling in the service of raising issues about the moral transactions of mob narrative in the life world of <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> ” (26). He cites Bakhtin’s notion of the “authoritative word” demanding acknowledgement, one manifestation being “the word of the fathers,” which in Puzo is the word of the godfather. Messenger employs Boelhower on ethnic semiosis to explain the different forms the ethnic subject can take in American fiction. Inspired by Barthes, Messenger explains how popular fiction critics “are moved to restore the ideological component to texts” while elite fiction critics “are moved to poetize what they deem to be complex texts about social and cultural issues, often to the exclusion of such issues” (160). To that end, Messenger offers an extended comparison of Puzo’s novel and Doctorow’s <span class="booktitle">Ragtime</span>, distinguishing an elite text’s aesthetic potential from that of the mob narrative. In the tradition of Dreiser and Jack London, Messenger finds that Puzo shares an “extreme attraction to and repulsion from art and success [which are] in themselves melodramatic (182), and then applies Richard Chase on melodrama. Messenger succeeds, in the end, in making a legitimate enterprise of his meditation on <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> phenomenon. But still, the hand shakes. Citing Peter Rabinowitz on reading, Messenger admits that intensive critical scrutiny of <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> “fractures my reading responses into conflicting feelings and several judgments” but nonetheless, he “believes the comprehension of <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> is a very complex matter, which reaches deep into the history of American fiction and American configuration of the national errand and family” (36)</p>
<p>Of Italian-Americans, Messenger quips, “It’s a curious fate to be an ‘unprotected’ ethnic minority where all bets are off in contemporary politically correct discourse” (9). The portrayal of Italians in Godfather narratives, from Puzo’s novel through <span class="tvtitle">The Sopranos</span>, is unparalleled in contemporary representation, made possible only because Italian Americans are the twentieth century’s quintessentially ambivalent ethnic group. Their representatives may be found assimilated throughout the social order (academic, government, corporate) while at the same time they cultivate iconic outsider status through tales of the mafia - an organization which, as Tony Soprano tells his daughter, does not exist. Puzo, who at the beginning of his career had ambitions for elite fiction, emerges as the national snitch. Messenger explains that Puzo “cashes in the dream of art to identify with the dream of Don Corleone, the father who will never fail his family or cease to control his life. Corleone power will thrill millions, but when the tumblers finally fell and the safe door swung open to great success, the safe was empty, as far as Puzo was concerned. Puzo had no identity after <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> ” (75). For sociological reasons beyond the scope of Messenger’s study, Italian Americans are available for the kind of scrutiny and mythmaking which would be impossible for Asian or Hispanic immigrants, for example, despite the efforts of various anti-defamation groups supported by Italian American doctors and lawyers. “The real melting pot in <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> contains Puzo’s amalgam of crime, business, and family in sentiment and sensation, melodrama’s twin muses.” As such, Godfather narratives, right through a most recent manifestation in <span class="tvtitle">The Sopranos</span>, play out the core anxieties of assimilation and identity in the context of corporate capitalism. “The Corleones’s inexorable drive to authority in a country that believes in its collective destiny: to ‘make manifest’ beyond all reasonable doubt and to do so within violence that is ‘just business.’” As a result, Messenger concludes, “Puzo’s mob narrative has become a compelling version of our national story” (200).</p>
<p>What Puzo does best, in Messenger’s hands, is to align the central tropes of Godfather narratives to recognizable phenomena in elite fiction and literary theory. One example is the traditional Italian code of <span class="foreignWord">omerta</span>, which governs “what can or cannot be said according to situation” and which is “a male constant that leads to an extraordinary if isolated power” (122). Messenger finds links between this “Italian American ethnic silence” and “the silence of modernism;” links to such phenomena as absent centers and the presence of unnamed things in high-culture literary criticism. However, “silence is observed and performed by Puzo’s Sicilian-Americans in <span class="booktitle">The Godfather</span> but is not credited there by elite literary criticism, which wants to privilege silence only when it is metacommentary on language and history, not when it is an ethnically based custom of language and gesture” (123). What Messenger has located here and elsewhere are instances of simultaneous enactment, where elite and popular culture may exist in separate spheres, but whose universes are unmistakably parallel. Another example is the <span class="foreignWord">bella figura</span>, “the attention to form of presentation governing social situations and the code that expresses an individual’s public utterance and social script.” <span class="foreignWord">Bella figura</span> “governs oral communication and shapes its social pragmatics while providing its theatre” and, coincidentally, looks a lot like what elite critics might call professionalism. Most important is the maintenance of an impeccable coolness in the eyes of others, “especially in public appearances where indirectness and forms rule over frank exchange. For a Corleone to become impetuous, imprudent, impatient, to ‘not get the message,’ is to place the family at considerable risk and its enemies in real danger” (113).</p>
<p>Messenger may be too insistent in his claim that “At this point in critical debate, elite literary silences have cultural capital, whereas the silences in ethnic performance do not” (127), and the book is flawed only by a recurring implication that we should have known this all along. In fact, “we”, in the sense of mass culture, have indeed known it - as shown most recently by the massive cross-race, -class, and -gender audience attracted to <span class="tvtitle">The Godfather</span>. Tony Soprano is the new century’s “representative man,” a man “confused by business, wife, children, parents, and self,” according to Messenger. “He has assimilated even in the face of his own protests as an Italian American victim…. He is America’s most powerful and potentially most dangerous enduring dream” (288). The danger is in Soprano’s enactment of violent solutions to business and family problems, a fantasy of justice which continues to dominate the popular imagination. According to Messenger, this is indeed the most troubling element of the Godfather phenomenon, and may also be the reason for its mass appeal. “The question of who has the right to use violence in a society, if anyone, and how that right is sanctioned, censured, and qualified in fiction” (297) is the recurring and unanswerable question which draws audiences to these narratives. Perhaps the persistence of the question is the very reason that “the Corleones became ‘our gang.’”</p>
<p>(Chris Messenger reviewed Tom LeClair’s novel, <span class="booktitle">Passing Off</span>, in the <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/basketball">summer of 1998</a>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/corleones">Corleones</a>, <a href="/tags/stowe">stowe</a>, <a href="/tags/uncle-toms-cabin">uncle tom&#039;s cabin</a>, <a href="/tags/puzo">puzo</a>, <a href="/tags/godfather">the godfather</a>, <a href="/tags/popular-culture">popular culture</a>, <a href="/tags/francis-ford-coppola">Francis Ford Coppola</a>, <a href="/tags/sopranos">the sopranos</a>, <a href="/tags/italian-american">italian-american</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-slotkin">Richard Slotkin</a>, <a href="/tags/cultural">cultural</a>, <a href="/tags/america">america</a>, <a href="/tags/american-culture">american culture</a>, <a href="/tags/american-studies">american studies</a>, <a href="/tags/kant">kant</a>, <a href="/tags/bakhtin">bakhtin</a>, <a href="/tags/boelhower">Boelhower</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/doctorow">doctorow</a>, <a href="/tags/rag">rag</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator818 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comHope for Empowerment, Fear of Controlhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/ontological
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jan Van Looy</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Gaggi’s point of departure is the seeming crisis of the postmodern subject. Since Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and to a lesser extent, Lyotard, the subject is generally viewed as a construction coming from outside man rather than an ontological <span class="foreignWord">a priori</span>. The concept of the self seems to be imprinted by language into our thinking. The way we see and feel ourselves is the result of influences and discourses from the world surrounding us, rather than from some preexisting entity within. Alongside this theoretical challenge to the subject, there is also the more recent, more pragmatic attack from theorists such as Jameson and Baudrillard. They have observed that in a world where media images are becoming more and more important, these images exert a growing influence on how we see ourselves, and how our self is constituted.</p>
<p>No wonder critics have posed the question of whether the subject is still valuable as a theoretical concept. If the subject is a construction that is decentered, fragmented, and altogether unstable, why should we accord it a special value? Gaggi mentions a building, an automobile, and a computer - all of which we can construct and destroy without moral regret. If we regard the self as a mere construction, is this not equal to opening the gates for a totalitarianism where human beings no longer count? Gaggi believes otherwise. The traditional subject has been deconstructed, not destroyed, and through this deconstruction its phallocentric, logocentric, and carnivorous aspects have been laid bare. Now we have the opportunity to reconstruct from the bits and pieces of the traditional subject a new, more tolerant and democratic subject. Very likely, a not insignificant part of this reconstruction will take place in the media. For this reason, Gaggi claims that:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">critical analysis of representation, representation of the subject in particular, remains an urgent issue. The critic’s role is examining how texts speak to the social subject, how they imply or construct a subject to which they speak, or how they deconstruct that always spoken subject. (xi, xii)</p>
<p>This is the strategy Silvio Gaggi pursues through most of his book. He analyzes subject construction and deconstruction in selected examples of painting and visual art, literature, film, and electronic media. Each chapter is devoted to a different art form, concentrating on a few paradigmatic works. Gaggi contrasts the photography of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger with fifteenth-century paintings such as van Eyck’s <span class="booktitle">Wedding of Arnolfini</span>. He analyzes the “subject of discourse” in works by Conrad, Faulkner, and Calvino and explores how the subject is dynamically represented in films such as Coppola’s <span class="booktitle">One from the Heart</span> and Altman’s <span class="booktitle">The Player</span>. Why these works are so paradigmatic or even why they have been chosen for analysis is not always clear. But, then again, this non-methodology is becoming a habit in contemporary criticism. In the wake of the Canon debates, the reader is simply not supposed to pose any questions regarding the grounds for selections within, or even subjective takes on, the written corpus.</p>
<p>Most of the discussion of hypertext is based on Landow’s work with Intermedia, a hypertext system developed at Brown University (101). Therefore, what we get is a very conventional, almost traditional, enumeration of claims put forward in early hypertext criticism. For those readers seeking a nice and neat overview, this may be convenient, but people who are up to date with the subject will experience <span class="foreignWord">deja vu</span>. Very briefly: hypertext is supposed to reduce the sense of primary texts and thus decenter the canon. The distinction between text and context and reader and writer is lost. Every reader is empowered in that she can append her own comments and responses and add links at will. Due to the ease of collaboration, learning and writing become a communal rather than an individual endeavor. In this way, the transition from text to hypertext may change our consciousness possibly to the same extent as did the transition from oral to written culture.</p>
<p>For Gaggi, hypertext involves a paradoxical relationship to the subject (114). The reader of hypertext or the user of networks is both empowered and enfeebled at the same time. She is empowered because she can move freely within the electronic space, access information of all kinds, and communicate with diverse individuals and groups, regardless of their physical location. At the same time, individual identity diminishes due to the separation from one’s name and material body.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Wonderfully indifferent to race, gender, beauty, and station in life outside the Web, the network absorbs the individual into an interactive dialogue in which the conversation assumes a life of its own and threatens to eclipse the participants who provide its content. (xiii)</p>
<p>However, the discussion becomes more animated when it gets to hyperfiction and more particularly Michael Joyce’s self-proclaimed hypertextual classic <span class="booktitle">Afternoon, a story</span>. Gaggi’s critique of Joyce’s work is devastating. When he discusses his own reading experience, Gaggi denies the surplus value of the format:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">One becomes involved in <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span> in much the same way one becomes involved in conventional stories, except that navigating one’s way through it is more demanding and confusing. (124)</p>
<p>But his critique reaches a more personal level when discussing the overall structure. “Sometimes lexias get linked in ways that don’t make sense, or, if they do, it may be a strange sense that they make.” Moreover, as a reader one cannot but link these remarks to an earlier passage, when Gaggi discusses the negative potential of hypertext:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Although the reader’s ability to make choices <span class="lightEmphasis">seems</span> to indicate control and empowerment, that empowerment may be specious. The complexity of the web and the possibility of having to make decisions without sufficient information regarding where any choice may lead can result in a disorientation that precludes meaningful freedom. (104)</p>
<p>Aside from <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>, Gaggi extensively discusses Stuart Moulthrop’s <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span>. Although the analysis itself is thorough and at times absorbing, the fact that he does not go beyond these “canonized” works left me with a bad taste. On the book’s cover Emory Elliott, the series editor, writes:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that is about all Gaggi does observe. For about half a page, he discusses the new possibilities of on-line artistic and literary collaboration. But that is as far as he gets, which, to me, hardly seems worth mentioning on a cover, except, of course, for marketing reasons.</p>
<p>Finally, I would like to dig deeper into a message more implicit than explicit in <span class="booktitle">From Text to Hypertext</span>, one expressing fear and hope at the same time: fear of control, hope for empowerment. When reading Gaggi, one becomes increasingly aware of the author’s sense of unease about the current crisis of the subject, particularly as it has been used against poststructural ideas.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Attacks on postmodernism and poststructuralism have been increasingly common, choreographed in part by the conservative political establishment, part of a continuing attack on intellectuals, artists, and the academy itself. (144)</p>
<p>At the same time, Gaggi seems to fear the consequences of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. He seems to be afraid that the deconstructed subject will be recuperated by the wrong people and thus, “regardless of the ethics and politics of those who theorize the subject, license the construction of social subjects who behave and consume in ways most beneficial to those who control representation.”</p>
<p>In this context, the passages dealing with the negative side(s) of television are undoubtedly the juiciest of the whole book:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In television it is the proliferation of irrelevant choices that produces a specious freedom that obscures increasingly powerful constraints <a class="internal" href="/internetnation/hypertext">Jan Baetens discerns freedom within the constrained writing of Raymond Federman</a> on imaginable possibilities. Ninety cable channels might broadcast shows that entertain but none of which contain serious social or political analysis. Thus, viewers are provided with an illusion of freedom that is really equivalent to a grocery aisle filled with different brands of laundry detergent. (120)</p>
<p>The controlling forces, “Madison Avenue, MTV and reactionary political groups” <span class="lightEmphasis">(sic.)</span> seem to have a stranglehold on culture and ideology. A typical example is the Gulf war, which - according to Gaggi - can be seen as an attempt “to recoup the control of reality and representation that was traumatically lost in Vietnam.”</p>
<p>However, Gaggi has high hopes regarding the potential of hypertext to “supplant MTV, which, for all its efforts to create spectacular visual effects and shocking content, has, for the most part become highly conventionalized and uninteresting” (120). For the first time since the 1960s, there is an opportunity for culture to be produced from the bottom up rather than be imposed from the top down. Thus, there is an important difference between Baudrillard’s hyperreality of mass media and the hypertextuality of electronic networks, although they are often discussed in the same breath. In hypertext we have at least the possibility of a democratic world created by the interaction of great numbers of participants, instead of a few powerful controllers.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/poststruct">poststruct</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/lacan">lacan</a>, <a href="/tags/jameson">jameson</a>, <a href="/tags/baudrillard">baudrillard</a>, <a href="/tags/landow">landow</a>, <a href="/tags/decentering-subject-fiction">Decentering Subject Fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/visual-arts">Visual Arts</a>, <a href="/tags/phallocenter">phallocenter</a>, <a href="/tags/phallocentric">phallocentric</a>, <a href="/tags/logocenter">logocenter</a>, <a href="/tags/logocentric">logocentric</a>, <a href="/tags/carnivorous">carnivorous</a>, <a href="/tags/representation">representation</a>, <a href="/tags/subjectivity">subjectivity</a>, <a href="/tags/canon">canon</a>, <a href="/tags/intermedia">intermedia</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator727 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comFriedrich Kittler's Technosublimehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/future-anterior
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Bruce Clarke</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In the 1970s a number of texts came into English translation bearing titles with a 1-2-3 punch, mixing exemplary authors with generic modes and methodological issues; for instance, Roland Barthes’s <span class="booktitle">Sade, Fourier, Loyola</span> and <span class="booktitle">Image, Music, Text</span>, containing the essays “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” and “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” and Michel Foucault’s <span class="booktitle">Language, Counter-Memory, Practice</span> with the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The title <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span>, a cognate translation of the German, echoes these theoretical signatures. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/archival">Matt Kirschenbaum tries his hand at this with “Media, Geneology, History,” his review of Bolter and Grusin</a></p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> Kittler contrasts the restriction of Foucault’s discourse theory to textual archives with his own wider media band, in which phonographic and cinematic data streams decenter the channel of literary writing. But his commentators agree that Kittler’s “media discourse theory” follows from Foucault as the prime member of the triumvirate Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. Lacan runs a close second. Kittler writes: “Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called <span class="booktitle">Writings</span>, the seminars, <span class="booktitle">Seminar</span>, the radio interview, <span class="booktitle">Radiophonie</span>, and the TV broadcast, <span class="booktitle">Television</span> ” (170). <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> partakes of this same postsymbolic media literalism.</p>
<p>I write about Kittler from the standpoint of a scholar of British and American literature who dropped from the tree of Columbia’s core humanities curriculum to the seed-bed of canonical romanticism and modernism and the theory culture of the 1970s and 1980s, then passed through the forcing house of literature and science in the 1990s, to arrive at the threshold of contemporary media studies. In the process I seem to have become posthuman, but Kittler’s work reassures me that I had no choice in the matter: “media determine our situation” (xxxix). Kittler parlays high poststructuralism into a historical media theory that humbles the subject of humanistic hermeneutics by interpellation into the discrete material channels of communication. Media studies bids to become a hegemonic site within the new academic order of a wired culture. For Kittler, media determine our posthumanity and have been doing so in technological earnest at least since the phonograph broke the storage monopoly of writing.</p>
<p>As a kind of media theory of History, a requiem and good-riddance for the era of so-called Man, <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> transmits the tenor of its own historical moment. The German edition appeared in 1986, the year after the opening of MIT’s Media Lab and the release of Talking Heads’ post-hermeneutic concert film and album <span class="filmtitle">Stop Making Sense</span>. Other resonant events in American culture include the publication of William Gibson’s <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span> (1984), Donna Haraway’s <span class="booktitle">Manifesto for Cyborgs</span> (1985), and Octavia Butler’s <span class="booktitle">Xenogenesis</span> trilogy (1987-89). Memories and premonitions of mushroom clouds loomed over these three speculative and/or scholarly scenarios published during the final decade of the Cold War; each text imagines the form of a posthuman or post-nuclear world. <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> posits its posthumanity on the premise that the Strategic Defense Initiative has already set off the fireworks, that the future is always already a prequel to Star Wars. The text begins with the observation that optical fiber networks are “immune…to the bomb. As is well known, nuclear blasts send an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) through the usual copper cables, which would infect all connected computers” (1), and the book ends with before-and-after photos of Hiroshima (262).</p>
<p>Many of Kittler’s sublime effects result from a kind of hyperbolic digitality, i.e., all-or-nothing assertions pressing seemingly local instances into global histories. For instance, Kittler is fond of audacious chronologies that parody the popular media’s demand for appearances of journalistic exactitude: “around 1880 poetry turned into literature” (14), or “around 1900, love’s wholeness disintegrates into the partial objects of particular drives” (70). One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s famous dictum: “in or about December, 1910, human character changed,” and, thanks to Kittler, perhaps now we know why. A related rhetorical scheme mediating the grand transformations of modernism is the from/to formation: “literature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise” (51), or as combined with an audacious chronology: “from imagination to data processing, from the arts to the particulars of information technology and physiology - that is the historic shift of 1900” (73). Again, and as the volume is coming to a conclusion with the arrival of Turing’s universal computer, “the hypothetical determinism of a Laplacian universe, with its humanist loopholes (1795), was replaced by the factual predictability of finite-state machines” (245).</p>
<p>Kittler wrote <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> just as chaos theory was arriving to throw a wrench into such stark digital determinism, precisely through the operational finitude as well as non-linear iterations of “finite-state machines.” As John von Neumann pointed out in 1948 in “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” digital computers could produce perfect results, “as long as the operation of each component produced only fluctuations within its preassigned tolerance limits” (294). But, von Neumann continued, even so, computational error is reintroduced by the lack of the infinite digits necessary to carry out all calculations with perfect precision. Kittler melodramatizes Turing’s work, it seems to me, because he is captivated by the towering image of an informatic colossus.</p>
<p>Such an all-determining and inescapable imago of media induces a productive critical paranoia. The media are always already watching us, putting their needles into our veins: “humans change their position - they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface” (210). <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span> ‘s Wintermute is everywhere, or as Kittler phrases it, “data flows…are disappearing into black holes and…bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands” (xxxix). At the same time, he enables one to see the particular and pandemic pathologies of modern paranoia precisely as psychic effects driven by the panoptic reach of media technologies in their surveillance and punishment modes. Not for nothing is the apocalypse according to Schreber’s <span class="booktitle">Memoirs</span> a prophetic book of prominent proportions in Kittler’s media cosmos.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> the objects of science are subsumed into the will-to-power of media technology. By way of contrast, despite his coinage of “technoscience” to underscore the sociological inextricability of the two, Bruno Latour sorts science and technology into separate treatments and preserves their disciplinary and epistemological distinctions. Yet one should not see Kittler falling under Latour’s blanket indictment of (Baudrillardian) postmodernism: “Instead of moving on to empirical studies of the networks that give meaning to the work of purification it denounces, postmodernism rejects all empirical work as illusory and deceptively scientistic” (Latour 46). Kittler busts open the realm of the real to examine the nonsymbolic and nonimaginary residues of communication technology, all that which cannot be posted: “Bodies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires” (Kittler 46). Where Latour finds the proliferating quasi-objects of mediation, Kittler finds the literal networks of communications media.</p>
<p>For the most part Kittler elides the history of physics concurrent with his media history - the cross-over from late-classical determinism to statistical mechanics, from thermodynamic entropy to information entropy. On the one hand, he scants the ether and the electromagnetic field theories which made possible many developments from analog to digital processing, and from pre-electrical storage technology (photography, phonography) to broadcast transmission (radio, television), electronic storage and manipulation (tape deck, video camera), and digital computation (microprocessor, fiber optic cable) technologies. But on the other hand, that lacuna has opened the door for major efforts among Kittler’s German and American scholarly associates, including the editors of Stanford’s Writing Science series, who have both midwived Kittler’s delivery into North American discourse and paralleled Kittler’s media emphasis with research projects that bring to science studies a thoroughgoing “materiality of communication.”</p>
<p>“Once the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writing exploded Gutenberg’s writing monopoly around 1880, the fabrication of so-called Man became possible” (16). I take it that the “fabrication” in question here is not the discursive construction of the humanist subject but the simulation of its spiritual activities by media devices. One notes Kittler’s detour around physics in the continuation of this passage: so-called Man’s “essence escapes into apparatuses…. And with this differentiation - and not with steam engines and railroads - a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic” (16). Missing from this formulation is the mode of energy, which would correspond by structural default to the Lacanian register of the imaginary. Indeed, Kittler runs up against numerous phantasmagorias of energy, but elides them by metonymic reification in media receivers and inscription devices.</p>
<p>The phantasmagorias of energy I have in mind are those that emanated from the nineteenth-century wave theories connecting the physics of optics and acoustics through an analogy between vibratory media - the air and the luminiferous ether. As sanctioned by the first law of thermodynamics, i.e., the conservation and interconvertibility of energy, the optical imaginary of ether waves is easily displaced to sound waves propagated through the air. We see this concatenation and transposition of physical and technological media in a delightful short story by Salomo Friedlaender, “Goethe Speaks into the Phonograph” (1916), which Kittler republishes in its entirety.</p>
<p>Friedlaender’s comic narrator unveils the thoughts of Professor Abnossah Pschorr, Edisonian inventor-extraordinaire of media gadgetry: “When Goethe spoke, his voice produced vibrations…. These vibrations encounter obstacles and are reflected, resulting in a to and fro which becomes weaker in the passage of time but which does not actually cease” (60). Pschorr extends to the air trapped in Goethe’s study a hypothetical characteristic much discussed in the late nineteenth-century popularization of the ether, its cosmic storage capacity. For instance, in 1875 British thermodynamicists Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait wrote that the luminiferous ether</p>
<p class="longQuotation">may only be an arrangement in virtue of which our universe keeps up a memory of the past at the expense of the present…. A picture of the sun may be said to be travelling through space with an inconceivable velocity, and, in fact, continual photographs of all occurrences are thus produced and retained. A large portion of the energy of the universe may thus be said to be invested in such pictures (156).</p>
<p>While rehearsing the same imaginary accessing of physical (as opposed to technological) media archives, Kittler leaves unmentioned the contemporary vogue connecting the spirits of the dead to the storage and transmission capacities of the luminiferous ether. Kittler cites from another (unnamed) Friedlaender story the assertion that “all the waves of all bygone events are still oscillating in space…. All that happens falls into accidental, unintentional receivers. It is stored, photographed, and phonographed by nature itself,” and comments, “Loyally and deliriously, Friedlaender’s philosophy follows in the wake of media technology” (77). But it also follows from prior scientistic anticipations of new storage capacities projected onto the ether medium. In an 1884 discussion of ether as a surface that forms at the interface of the third and fourth dimensions of space, hyperspace theorist Charles Howard Hinton completed this technoscientific circuit by conceiving the ether medium itself as a cosmic phonograph:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">For suppose the æther, instead of being perfectly smooth, to be corrugated, and to have all manner of definite marks and furrows. Then the earth, coming in its course round the sun on this corrugated surface would behave exactly like the phonograph behaves. In the case of the phonograph the indented metal sheet is moved past the metal point attached to the membrane. In the case of the earth it is the indented æther which remains still while the material earth slips along it. Corresponding to each of the marks in the æther there would be a movement of matter, and the consistency and laws of the movements of matter would depend on the predetermined disposition of the furrows and indentations of the solid surface along which it slips (196-97).</p>
<p>My point is that the multiplicity of the concept of “media” extends beyond its particular technological instantiations to include both scientific and spiritualistic registers. A history of media could concern itself as well with the luminiferous ether and the Anima Mundi, the subtle fluids and strange angels that intermingled with the departed souls and trick shots of phonography and cinema; but for the most part, Kittler displaces this business to premodernist media:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">the invention of the Morse alphabet in 1837 was promptly followed by the tapping specters of spiritistic seances sending their messages from the realm of the dead. Promptly as well, photographic plates - even and especially those taken with the camera shutter closed - furnished reproductions of ghosts or specters (12).</p>
<p>The telegraph and daguerreotype remain outside <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter’s</span> primary historical field. Even here, however, the Kittler effect opens up research corridors by insisting on the material basis, and thus empirical examinability, of the media that mediate the cultural imaginary: “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture” (13).</p>
<p>Beyond that I have nothing but admiration for this volume. Kittler’s fundamental derivation of Lacan’s real, imaginary, and symbolic from the data channels of phonograph, cinema, and typewriter is an astonishing theoretical event. It offers a comprehensive reading of psychoanalysis into technoscience that grows more convincing the more one gets acclimated to Kittler’s methods of channel processing across the cybernetic bridge from the nervous system and its “psychic apparatus” to the <span class="booktitle">Aufschreibesysteme</span> of his media discourse networks. In this reading, the hallucinatory powers and spiritual effects of literature derived from a storage-and-transmission monopoly that could only funnel and traduce the real and the imaginary into the narrow band of the symbolic. As the translators remark in their excellent Introduction: “in short, people were programmed to operate upon media in ways that enabled them to elide the materialities of communication” (xxii). It is both exhilarating and disquieting to submit to Kittler’s deprogramming. But the institutional regimes that sustained the privileges of literary discourse networks (and of us who still inhabit them) are increasingly caught up in the media transformations Kittler describes. The daemonic angel of our history is being driven by the electronic differentiation and digital reintegration of data flows.</p>
<p>At another level, Kittler passes on a wealth of useful engineering expertise: matters of time-axis manipulation from Edison to Jimi Hendrix; the historical mathematics of music and sound: “Overtones are frequencies…. Intervals and chords, by contrast, were ratios” (24); the non-negligible difference between a phonograph and a gramophone (the latter is restricted to playback, the former also records); the physical differences between acoustic and optical waves, such that “cuts stood at the beginning of visual data processing but entered acoustic data processing only at the end” (117-18); the reasons why the first mass-produced typewriters were developed for blind people by arms manufacturers; the pervasive loops between warfare and media, e.g., the revolving cylinder that unites typewriters, film-projectors, and machine-guns, and the collusion of the piano, the typewriter, and Turing’s universal computer; the enigmas of the Enigma machine.</p>
<p>And then, in the midst of this media mayhem, a canny persuasion - a literary core of archival gems. In addition to valuable translations of Friedlaender’s “Goethe Speaks into the Phonograph” and “Fata Morgana Machine” (which limns the eversion of virtual reality eighty years before Marcos Novak), this volume also contains complete texts of Jean-Marie Guyau’s “Memory and Phonograph” (1880); Rilke’s amazing meditation on the phonograph, “Primal Sound” (1919); Maurice Renard’s audio phantasms in “Death and the Shell” (1907); the sonnet “ ‘Radio Wave,’ which the factory carpenter Karl August Düppengiesser of Stolberg submitted to Radio Cologne in 1928”; Richard A. Bermann’s spoof of the sex war between male poets and female typists “Lyre and Typewriter” (1913); and Carl Schmitt’s facetious but telling “world history of inscription,” “The Buribunks: A Historico-Philosophical Meditation” (1918).</p>
<p>In sum, ranging over literature, music and opera from Wagner to acid rock, philosophy, cinema, psychoanalysis classical and structural, history, mathematics, communications technology, and computer science, Kittler’s broadband scholarly panoptics afford a sublime techno-discursive vista, and in particular a point of lucid observation on the ongoing relativization of literary production. Kittler transposes Kant’s mathematical sublime into the mechanical transcendence of communications technology over individual subjects, displacing human psychology into machine being, setting off repeated implosions by which so-called Man is apocalypsed into infinite media loops. His high-prophetic meld of Lacan’s laconism and Zarathustra’s hammer facilitates a neuromantic network of discursive intensities. Under the conditions of technological mediation, however, theory remains viable, or inevitable. Ineluctably funneled through the “bottleneck of the signifier” (4) but pieced out with a tremendous portfolio of period graphics, Kittler’s illuminated writings operate a machine aesthetic tooled to the posthumanist discursivities of his intellectual heroes, but going beyond them to place the stylus of technology on the groove of inscripted bodies.</p>
<p>—————————————————————</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Butler, Octavia. <span class="booktitle">Xenogenesis: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago</span>. New York: Warner, 1987-89.</p>
<p>Gibson, William. <span class="booktitle">Neuromancer</span>. New York: Ace, 1984.</p>
<p>Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. <span class="booktitle">Materialities of Communication</span>. Trans. William Whobrey. Standford: Stanford UP, 1994.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” <span class="booktitle">Socialist Review</span> 80 (1985): 65-108.</p>
<p>Hinton, Charles Howard. “A Picture of Our Universe.” <span class="booktitle">Scientific Romances</span>, 1st series. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1886; reprint 1st and 2nd series. New York: Arno Press, 1976. 1:161-204.</p>
<p>Johnston, John. “Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory After Poststructuralism.” Kittler 2-26.</p>
<p>Kittler, Friedrich. <span class="booktitle">Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays</span>. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997.</p>
<p>Latour, Bruno. <span class="booktitle">We Have Never Been Modern.</span> Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.</p>
<p>Lenoir, Timothy, ed. <span class="booktitle">Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication</span>. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.</p>
<p>Schreber, Daniel Paul. <span class="booktitle">Memoirs of my Nervous Illness</span>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.</p>
<p>Stewart, Balfour, and P.G. Tait. <span class="booktitle">The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State</span>. New York: Macmillan, 1875.</p>
<p>Wellbery, David E. Foreword. Friedrich A. Kittler. <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks 1800/1900</span>. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. vii-xxxiii.</p>
<p>Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, and Michael Wutz. “Translators’ Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis.” In Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span>, xi-xxxviii.</p>
<p>von Neumann, John. <span class="booktitle">The General and Logical Theory of Automata</span>. In Collected Works. Ed. A. H. Taub. 5 vols. New York: Pergamon Press, 1961-63. 5:288-328.</p>
<p>Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” <span class="booktitle">The Gender of Modernism</span>. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 634-41.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/butler">butler</a>, <a href="/tags/haraway">haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/cyborg">cyborg</a>, <a href="/tags/gibson">gibson</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/goethe">goethe</a>, <a href="/tags/technolog">technolog</a>, <a href="/tags/friedlaender">friedlaender</a>, <a href="/tags/bruce-clarke">bruce clarke</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-kittler">friedrich kittler</a>, <a href="/tags/grammophone">grammophone</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/typewriter">typewriter</a>, <a href="/tags/foucault">foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/media-discourse-theory">media discourse theory</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags/discourse">discourse</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/turing">turing</a>, <a href="/tags/paranoia">paranoia</a>, <a href="/tags/parano">parano</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator724 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comNew Media and Old: The Limits of Continuityhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/cinematic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Geniwate</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-08-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Lev Manovich starts <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span> with reference to an avant-garde film of 1929 called “Man with a movie camera” by Dziga Vertov. I thought I would commence my review of his book with a reference to a contemporary work of new media called biennale.py, created by 0100101110101101.org and EpidemiC for the Venice Biennale.</p>
<p>Biennale.py is a benign computer virus written in a new language, Python. “The main goal of our virus is just to survive,” say the authors. “And, it can better survive when it doesn’t do any harm to the host.” There are a variety of ways this work can be interpreted, including politically and aesthetically (the code can be found <a class="outbound" href="http://www.0100101110101101.org">here</a>).</p>
<p>However, when biennale.py is installed it becomes an invisible part of the computer’s programmed environment. In this mode of existence, the work has no visible representation at all. Nevertheless it is doing what it is designed to do, and according to the authors and the Venice Biennale, it qualifies as art - new media art. How does this sort of work fit in to the paradigms of <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>?</p>
<p>Born in the USSR and now living in the USA, Lev Manovich sees himself as a “post communist subject” (Tribe, Preface xi) and a hybrid theorist and worker in new media. In <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>, Manovich is attempting “both a record and a theory of the present” (7). He attempts to relate new media “within the history of modern visual and media cultures” (8). He does this by trying “to describe computer media’s semiotic codes, modes of address and audience reception patterns” (7).</p>
<p>Manovich is self-consciously making a first theory of new media, aware that his views will be highly critiqued as soon as the dust-jacket ink has dried.</p>
<p>The author believes that cinema is the key cultural form of the twentieth century (9). Furthermore, cinematic ways of seeing the world have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data (xv).</p>
<p>This intellectual debt to cinema results in some interesting observations. For example, Manovich discusses the commitment amongst new media developers and software programmers to realism, regardless of the fact that new media images are simulations, and therefore not indexically “real” (184). It is reasonable to interpret this as an attempt by new media creators to continue in the tradition of cinematic realism. However, it is less obvious that this is an appropriate or inevitable result of new media, as Manovich seems sometimes to imply (180, 196).</p>
<p>While Manovich discusses the ultimate impossibility of realism in new media, reference to non-realist traditions in modern art are quickly glossed, and his assertion that new media is not “an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality” (xxiii) is not fully explored. This unwillingness to completely engage with non-representational artforms may be attributable to his intellectual debt to cinema.</p>
<p>Manovich proclaims that the recent “revolution” in media production concerns the translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers (20). In my opinion, Manovich has rightly discerned the “most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent - programmability” (47). He introduces the concept of transcoding. The computer has become “a media synthesizer and manipulator” (26) and as such, new media is the result of a blend of human and computer meanings (46).</p>
<p>Manovich could have spent more time exploring the aesthetic and ontological implications of the programmed nature of new media. Instead he concentrates on the debt of new media to cinema and as a result foregrounds visual culture much more than any other type. The number of times he refers to audio artforms could probably be counted on one hand.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most interesting chapter is “The forms,” in which Manovich discusses the significance of the database (used here in a non-technical sense) as the organising principle for programmed media, which has become not only a new way to store, sort and retrieve data (and then reconfigure it) but also is “a new metaphor for conceptualizing individual and collective cultural memory” (214).</p>
<p>Opposed to this organising principle is another new media ideal, which is that new media objects should be “immersive,” in the way that literature and cinema are traditionally considered:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Often, the two goals of information access and psychological engagement compete within the same new media object. (216)</p>
<p>One of the main traditional techniques for immersion is narrative. Manovich questions the possibility of narrative given a database structure, which enables equality of access to all files, and subverts the sort of progression that narrative depends upon (221). He proposes that narrative may be replaced by a new “cultural algorithm,” which is:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">reality -&gt; media -&gt; data -&gt; database<br />
(224-5)</p>
<p>He goes on to suggest that narrative is a challenge currently facing new media artists (xxviii). This is an important point that I would have liked to hear more about. (I suspect a solution will be found in which future new media artists will more fully incorporate game mechanisms and sophisticated approaches to variables in their work.)</p>
<p>Once again Manovich perhaps overstates the conceptual debt of new media to cinema in arguing that cinema “exists at the intersection between database and narrative” (237) and foregrounding Vertov as a “database film maker” (239). On Manovich’s criteria, I suspect many artists are database artists - certainly the process sounds very familiar to me</p>
<p>At the level of individual ideas and insights this is an invaluable book. But whether Manovich achieves his big-picture ambitions is doubtful, and that’s where biennale.py comes in.</p>
<p>Biennale.py cannot easily be related to cinema. It is a “performative” artwork that is dependent on a programmed environment. The graphical user interface and hardware monitor that accompanies contemporary computers and makes clear reference to cinematic heritage is barely relevant to the “performance” of this work.</p>
<p>Manovich’s analysis of new media does not make room for such works as biennale.py. Thus we have reached the limits of the argument for continuity. Manovich says:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">New media objects are cultural objects; thus, any new media object can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent. (15)</p>
<p>The implicit question posed for Manovich by biennale.py is what does it represent? These coded, performative works are, perhaps, the “abstract art” of new media.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span> is beautifully published and contains a useful index. The scholarship is impressive. Unfortunately it suffers from under-editing. The cursory nature of the proof editing results in many uncorrected typographical and spelling errors. A more in-depth structural edit may have decreased the number of repetitions in the book.</p>
<p>There is much to engage new media theorists and artists in <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span> and I don’t hesitate to recommend it. However as a grand narrative <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span> is at most a partial history of a genre that is so much in flux that parts of the book are already out of date (for example, since it was published a most convincing animation of human hair has been created in the film <span class="filmtitle">Final Fantasy</span>).</p>
<p>The continued relevance of cinema to new media appears to be thrown into doubt by Manovich himself at the end of his book:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">This opening up of cultural techniques, conventions, forms, and concepts is ultimately the most promising cultural effect of computerization - an opportunity to see the world and human being anew, in ways that were not available to “a man with a movie camera.” (333)</p>
<p>This ending surprised me, and also left me wondering what the icon of new media art might become (as Vertov’s movie camera is for cinema). The computer screen? Zeros and ones? Files and folders? Or might it be inappropriate to consider visual symbols at all - how do you represent a database or an algorithm? Is iconographic representation viable? And if not, surely we are dealing with quite a different medium than cinema.</p>
<p>Perhaps contemporary media theorists and artists are too influenced by their engagement with old media to successfully write this book. Perhaps the book could be re-written as a collaboration between a digital visual artist, a digital audio artist, an electronic writer and a programmer (and probably others). Perhaps we should wait ten years for younger hybrid “artists” with a more mature “language” than the one we are currently trying to twist to suit a culture that is currently obscured by past arts.</p>
<p>I guess the book had to be attempted, and it is an act of bravery and considerable insight to have done so. But we will have to wait and see whether the new artists and theorists will be standing on Manovich’s shoulders.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/python">python</a>, <a href="/tags/immersive">immersive</a>, <a href="/tags/dziga-vertov">dziga vertov</a>, <a href="/tags/biennalepy">Biennale.py</a>, <a href="/tags/australia">australia</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator698 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comStuttering Screams and Beastly Poetryhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/musicsoundnoise/undigitized
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Allison Hunter</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Douglas Kahn’s <span class="booktitle">Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts</span> amplifies a rattled and diseased 20th century body. The meat and bones that have traversed two World Wars - the nervous system, the electro-shock of modern care - all finally cry out in stuttering screams and beastly poetry. According to Kahn, modernism fully imbued the body with language through techniques of inscription, vibration, and amplification. But that only leaves us with the even more resolute objecthood of the body, which was explored by artists during the decades following the 1960’s. Kahn argues that a thorough understanding of sound’s influence upon the visual, literary, and musical arts is missing from their separate - and usually separated - histories. To help us understand that influence, Kahn traces the development of recording technology, the shifting cultural relationship to noise, and the use of aural tropes within the arts.</p>
<p>The “in your face” book jacket cover portends a postmodern focus from Kahn. Acid green and electric blue cyber colors enhance the photograph of the screaming bald pixilated head on the cover. This cover is strikingly different than that of Kahn’s previous book, <span class="booktitle">Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde</span> (MIT, 1992), which he co-edited with Gregory Whitehead. <span class="booktitle">Wireless Imagination</span> ‘s understated jacket would easily be overlooked with its red and black text on a white background. <span class="booktitle">Noise Water Meat</span> is more Zone-like in its packaging, as if MIT Press perhaps sensed the timeliness of Kahn’s subject at a moment when sound is becoming more recognized within the arts, as is clear in recent high-profile museum exhibitions (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.whitney.org/bitstreams/">BitStreams</a>, <a class="outbound" href="http://010101.sfmoma.org/">010101</a>, <a class="outbound" href="http://crossfade.walkerart.org/">Crossfade</a>, etc.). It is all the more unexpected, then, when Kahn’s close reading of an interesting but limited cast of characters in the history of sound art from the early 1900’s to the early 1960’s stops with the Italian Futurists, John Cage, Fluxus artists, William Burroughs, Michael McClure, and Antonin Artaud - just when the contemporary resonance of his study might be most felt.</p>
<p>In the first section, “Noise,” Kahn introduces us to the avant-garde Italian Futurists who, against conventional notions - that music was periodic, harmonious, and created from a certain set of instruments, and noise was the unstable cancerous cell of sounds - brought the “war sounds” of World War I to the musical palette. The Italian Futurists used explosives from modern battle combined with recording technology to create a new sensibility for loud and different sounds that had once been dismissed as <span class="lightEmphasis">noise</span>.</p>
<p>Kahn also includes a short but fascinating look at Russian Experimental filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov. Vertov was among those who began to record sound on-location instead of within the sound studio. Like the Impressionist painters who left their studios to paint <span class="foreignWord">en plein air</span>, Vertov left the movie set to record sounds in their original context. In Vertov’s words, he captured the sounds of “life caught unawares” (143). Since recording studios commonly recreated “live” sound, they had no need for portable recording equipment. Vertov, determined to record from the tops of trains and the interiors of coalmines, invented his own “portable” equipment which resulted in 2,700 pounds of gear.</p>
<p>Kahn then moves us swiftly from the early part of the century in Europe to the US in the 1930’s, tracing the <span class="lightEmphasis">plasticity</span> of sound through the career of John Cage. In 1952, Cage performed his famous silent piece, <span class="booktitle">4’33</span>,”in which he shifted “the production of music from the site of utterance to that of audition” (158). <span class="booktitle">4’33</span> ” requires a solo performer to sit at the piano and mark off the time in three movements (30”, 2’23”, 1’40”), without playing the instrument. The duration of these movements was chosen by chance operation. Under the guise of a traditional composition (musical score, performer, instrument, audience) Cage exposed the similarity between silence and music - both can be measured in time. This musicalization of silence brought with it what Cage called <span class="lightEmphasis">unintentional sound</span>. As the silent piece was performed, the audience’s attention turned away from the piano/performer to the sounds of the room including coughing, chair scraping, and spontaneous comments. As Cage wrote, “People may leave my concerts thinking they have heard ‘noise,’ but will then hear unsuspected beauty in their everyday life” (184).</p>
<p>Kahn reveals an interesting fact that may have been an important influence on Cage’s development. In 1940 Cage applied to the WPA to work as a musician. Because of the experimental nature of his music, the government did not recognize him as someone who worked in music, and instead hired him as a recreation leader at a hospital, where he was told to entertain the children of visitors without disturbing the patients - that is, to perform in silence. Cage had to come up with new ways of performing for an audience without creating sound - twelve years before he wrote <span class="booktitle">4’33</span> “.</p>
<p>In the 1950’s, Cage taught <span class="booktitle">Experimental Music</span> at the New School for Social Research in New York City (attracting George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, and Al Hansen) and at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina (with Merce Cunningham, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg). Although Cage did not require his students to have a musical background, he did encourage performance and experimentation. The context of conventional musical performance shifted from the concert hall into the gallery or alternative space. Even the term performance was “moved” to “happening” and “event.” This created an atmosphere in which a variety of artists, from painters to musicians to actors, felt free to perform outside the constraints of their separate fields. Thus developed Fluxus, one of the most dynamic art movements of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Kahn develops the materiality of sound further by focusing on the synthesis of liquid and paint. The middle section of Kahn’s book, “Water,” details the use of water as a plastic and sonorous element by both Fluxus artists and Action Painters. [see Joseph McElroy’s essay, <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/resourceful">If It Could Be Wrapped</a>, for another elemental treatment of water, eds.] Although Jackson Pollock was not the only Abstract Expressionist who worked with the flow and stain of paint (Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, etc.), Kahn focuses on Pollock’s athletic performance which created “an <span class="lightEmphasis">all-over</span> composition that rushed <span class="lightEmphasis">out-from the wall</span> ” (274). This “rush” was literally recorded by Hans Namuth, who filmed Pollock’s brush strokes from behind a pane of glass. The audience <span class="lightEmphasis">saw</span> the wet paint perform a violent dance before landing on the flat surface and ultimately drying or dying. Kahn emphasizes the performance of the paint drip when he writes, “Prior to Pollock paint was meant to dry” (264).</p>
<p>Kahn’s invocation of Pollock makes it all the more interesting when he omits another artist who is crucial to the story: Joseph Beuys. Beuys, like Pollock, did not work with sound, but was pivotal in the Fluxus movement. More importantly, his anti-aesthetic, socially motivated statement, “everyone <span class="lightEmphasis">can</span> be an artist,” extended the possibilities of art to every act within every aspect of society, making art everywhere possible at every moment, just as Cage had done with the musicality of noise. Beuys’s artistic interventions were called <span class="lightEmphasis">actions</span> (his famous ecological Action, <span class="booktitle">7,000 Oaks</span> [1982-1987], involved planting 7,000 oaks in the German town of Kassel). Kahn’s omission of Beuys here is understandable - after all, Beuys didn’t work with sound - but it is no more understandable than his inclusion of Pollock. I point this out only because I take seriously Kahn’s larger project: to question the boundaries between the various arts and how those boundaries have excluded sound. Here, one wonders if Kahn - who is, after all, a musicologist - is not inadvertantly reconstructing those very boundaries.</p>
<p>Beuys’s omission is all the more striking because Kahn concludes <span class="booktitle">Noise Water Meat</span> with a departure from the amplified sounds of technology to the “raw” (read: animal) sounds of one’s body. The <span class="lightEmphasis">meat</span> of one’s <span class="lightEmphasis">body</span> is subject to biopsy, inscription, vibration, and shock treatment through the work of what I will call three <span class="lightEmphasis">meaticians</span>: William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, and Michael McClure. Kahn claims each used the body to speak the voice through different locations,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">William Burroughs at the microbial and cellular levels, Michael McClure at the muscular, and Antonin Artaud throughout different sites in a phantasmatic body pinned around the axis of the spine. (291)</p>
<p>That Kahn interchanges the word body with meat here without acknowledging their different connotations for male and female bodies is very distracting, to say the least. He mentions the performance <span class="booktitle">Meat Joy</span> (1964) by Carolee Schneeman but does not stop to register its very different deployment of the term meat in relation to the gendered body.</p>
<p>Burroughs, on the other hand, deployed a very different strategy, using the tropes of scientific discourse linking the body on a cellular level to the recording technology of the 20th century. His idea of <span class="lightEmphasis">language as a virus</span> was affected (or infected) by the organismic theories of Alfred Korzybski, Wilhelm Reich, and L. Ron Hubbard. Korzybski and Reich provided the scientific research, while Hubbard exemplified the evil nature of the virus. Hubbard’s book, <span class="booktitle">Dianetics</span> (1950), introduced Burroughs to the concept of the “engram” - the inscription of a painful memory recorded within the protoplasm of one’s body. Engrams were recorded by the “reactive mind,” one of two inner recorders (the other being the “analytic mind”). This constant presence of dual minds and memory tapes influenced Burrough’s viral view of language and how it inscribes itself in the body. Kahn quotes Burroughs’s <span class="booktitle">The Ticket That Exploded</span> (1962),</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. (317)</p>
<p>From here, Kahn moves to amplify the influence of Antonin Artaud’s use of the scream as a pivotal force in the development of performance for composers like David Tudor and John Cage as well as the Beat poets. Like the Futurists of World War I, Artaud brought a new sound from the <span class="emphasis">noise</span> of the world (childhood meningitis, psychiatric hospital shock treatments) to the voice of the actor. Artaud gave a voice, as it were, to the violent drip of paint and water. His tortured performance, his contorted facial expression, and bent screaming body incorporated the athleticism of Pollock’s gestures with the unpredictability of a Fluxus happening. But Artaud always made it clear that he was consciously operating within the cultural context of the theatre.</p>
<p>For Michael McClure, however, no such cultural or institutional context mediates his navigation of the murky space between animal and human (as Kahn interchanges body and meat). His poetry, written in <span class="emphasis">beast language</span>, emanates directly from his muscle and not his voice. McClure claims he is eluding the cultural cloak of language that would separate him as “man” from “beast.” In fact, McClure read his poetry to caged zoo animals who apparently “spoke” back (in <span class="emphasis">beast language</span>, of course).</p>
<p>McClure’s work as an ecological poet is less convincingly meatist as a medium than Artaud’s scream or Burroughs’s viral inscription, particularly since we learn how McClure studied kundalini yoga and orgone therapy, body practices that <span class="lightEmphasis">transcend</span> the physical. Orgone therapy and yoga use the “pulsational energy” of the body to access the powerful metaphysical force of the cosmos. If Kahn wants to use “Meat” in a book on the history of sound, then I want him to serve up a sinewy mass of marbled flesh, à la Schneeman. But hey, I am a postmodern gal, jaded by digital sampling, heartbeat sound effects, and sound art exhibits.</p>
<p>And yet, I learned something from Kahn I hadn’t expected. I learned to <span class="lightEmphasis">listen</span> to the musicality of undigitized everyday noise, the in-the-moment noise that intercepts life in unexpected and unpredictable combinations. The contemporary sound artist will learn a great deal from the early lessons in sound experimentation in Kahn’s book. I also found refreshing Kahn’s musicologist perspective on visual art history. However, beware of musical terms and concepts in the crucial first few chapters that may not be clear to someone with a limited background in music theory. Overall, this book is well worth the time required to complete all 400 pages. For such a lengthy book in this postmodern age of distraction, that is a compliment to Kahn. After <span class="booktitle">Noise Water Meat</span>, what’s for dessert?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/cage">cage</a>, <a href="/tags/burroughs">burroughs</a>, <a href="/tags/mcclure">mcclure</a>, <a href="/tags/artaud">artaud</a>, <a href="/tags/pollock">pollock</a>, <a href="/tags/vertov">vertov</a>, <a href="/tags/film">film</a>, <a href="/tags/wireless-imagination">Wireless Imagination</a>, <a href="/tags/douglas-kahn">Douglas Kahn</a>, <a href="/tags/stuttering-screams-and-beastly-poetry">Stuttering Screams and Beastly Poetry</a>, <a href="/tags/bitstreams">BitStreams</a>, <a href="/tags/010101">010101</a>, <a href="/tags/crossfade">crossfade</a>, <a href="/tags/sound-art">sound art</a>, <a href="/tags/fluxus">fluxus</a>, <a href="/tags/futurist">futurist</a>, <a href="/tags/futurism">futurism</a>, <a href="/tags/schneeman">Schneeman</a>, <a href="/tags/vertov">vertov</a>, <a href="/tags/bueys">bueys</a>, <a href="/tags/korzybski">korzybski</a>, <a href="/tags/reich">reich</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator689 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com